Friday, 14 November 2014

Armageddon and Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke’s posthumous Letters from America (1916) has an
unusual epilogue, entitled ‘An Unusual Young Man’. Is it an essay in the form
of a short story, or a short story disguised as an essay? Whichever, its
first-person narrator recalls a younger friend of his who, on a walking holiday
in Cornwall in the summer of 1914, only learned on his return that war had been
declared. The setting is certainly fictional, for Brooke was actually staying
with at Cley-next-the-sea on
August 3rd and 4th; but the young friend is Brooke
himself. So the older man, explaining the thoughts and feelings of his younger
friend, is a device enabling Brooke to reflect, with apparent detachment, on his
own anxious and contradictory reactions to the war.

His puzzlement comes because he loves
Germany – Bavaria and Munich especially – almost as much as he loves England,
and certainly more than France. He has good friends there, of whom he cannot help
thinking ‘heavily … all the time’. But when he tries to refocus, replacing old
memories of his new enemy with appropriately patriotic thoughts –

– he kept
remembering, unwillingly, a midnight in Carnival-time in Munich, when he had
seen a clown, a Pierrot, and a Columbine tip-toe delicately round a deserted
corner of Theresienstrasse, and vanish into the darkness. Then he thought of
the lights on the pavement in Trafalgar Square. It seemed to him the most
desirable thing in the world to mingle and talk with a great many English
people. Also, he kept saying to himself – for he felt vaguely jealous of the
young men in Germany and France – “Well, if Armageddon’s on, I suppose one
should be there.”

It’s as well the narrator admits that the
young man kept saying this, for Brooke himself had evidently used these same
words before. Shortly after the declaration of war, Brooke had wondered, with
impeccable Fabian logic, about getting
to France not by joining up, but by going over to help bring in the harvest.
After all, France had compulsory military service; its reservists had already
been called up; most of its farms were now short-handed. Less altruistically,
he had also toyed with becoming a war correspondent. However, Christopher
Hassall, whose biography of Brooke (though fifty years old this year) remains
the best, records that

His first idea, to go over and help the
French garner their crops, was now dropped, as also was the idea of reporting
for a newspaper. But it wasn’t easy to enlist. He was amazed by Harold Monroe’s experience,
who turned up on a motor-bicycle to volunteer, was rejected because his engine
was of the wrong kind, reappeared next day with another engine, and was told
there was no room. Meeting J.C.
Squire in the street, ‘Well, if Armageddon’s on,” Brooke said, “I suppose
one should be there.”

I’m not
a fan of biographies whose notes and bibliographies at the back of the book
threaten to swamp the narrative at the front, so I’m glad that Hassall wrote
his book before citation and referencing ad
tedium became the norm for all serious biography; but I should like to know
who heard (and recorded or reported) Brooke saying this to the poet and editor
J C Squire. Was it Squire, or Brooke himself, pleased enough with this
apocalyptic utterance to recycle it in ‘An Unusual Young Man’? Edward Marsh,
Brooke’s close friend, literary executor and author of the foundational ‘Memoir’
(1918), makes no mention of the meeting
or Brooke’s Armageddon remark. True, other biographers have repeated the story,
but again without reference, so I begin to wonder if they’re simply rehashing
Hassall. Here, for instance, is Nigel Jones:

Brooke toyed with various half-baked ideas
to be of use: did the French need hands to gather in the harvest now that so
many peasant-soldiers had been mobilized, he wondered. He also made a
half-hearted attempt to get a war-correspondent’s job, but there seemed to be
no interest. Back in London on August 10th, and hurrying from office
to office, he met the poet and journalist J.C. Squire in the street. Squire
asked him what all the rushing was for. ‘Well, if Armageddon is on,’ replied
Brooke, I suppose one should be there.’

‘Hurrying
… rushing …’ These are reasonable adjectives for a biographer to use in
creating a sense of Brooke’s mood of the time. But if his attempt to become a
war reporter was only ‘half-baked’, was Brooke really in that much of a hurry?
At least Jones is more specific than Hassall in providing a date – August 10th
– though Brooke was already in London the previous day: in a letter quoted (but
again not cited) by Marsh, he describes going to a music hall show. After a few
sketches and songs, the next item displeases Brooke, though he describes it,
and its aftermath, in detail:

“Then a dreadful
cinematographic reproduction of a hand drawing patriotic things – Harry Furniss
it was, funny pictures of a soldier and a sailor (at the time I suppose dying
in Belgium), a caricature of the Kaiser, greeted with a perfunctory hiss –
nearly everyone sat silent. Then a scribbled message was shown: ‘War declared
with Austria 11.9.’ There was a volley of quick, low hand-clapping – more a
signal of recognition than anything else. Then we dispersed into Trafalgar
Square and bought midnight War editions …. In all these days I haven’t been so
near tears; there was such tragedy and dignity in the people.”

Britain formally declared war on Austria on
9th August. The film Brooke had disliked was Peace and War Pencillings by Harry
Furniss, a cartoonist and illustrator for magazines such as Punch and the Illustrated London News. It had premièred at the Coliseum in St Martin’s Lane – hence the audience
had spilled out into Trafalgar Square. Was this, then, why the unusual young
man’s thoughts had turned from Theresienstrasse to Trafalgar Square?

In the
end, Brooke found a way of getting to Armageddon. Let Richard Aldington
have the last, touching (but still not necessarily reliable) word:

I had a last
glimpse of Rupert Brooke when Flint [FS
Flint, Aldington’s friend and fellow Imagist poet] and I bumped into him in
Piccadilly, not long after the outbreak of war. He was dressed in a shabby
macintosh, and looked a little sallow and less handsome than his pictures. He
at once informed us that he had a commission, and was about to join the Naval
Division at Antwerp. We wished him luck – a gallant but pathetic figure, the
last English poet who really believed in the romance and chivalry of war.

Adrian Barlow

[Illustration:
photograph of Rupert Brooke by Sherril Schell; frontispiece to Letters from America.

3 comments:

As always, Adrian, very interesting and thoughtful and original. Thank you! A little footnote - after Brooke's experiences at Antwerp [which included shell-bursts and artillery fire as well as retreating with a vast crowd of Belgian refugees], he wrote: ‘But it’s a bloody thing, half the youth of Europe, blown through pain to nothingness, in the incessant mechanical slaughter of these modern battles.’ The phrase ‘half the youth of Europe’ feels like a curious anticipation of Owen’s ‘half the seed of Europe’ in the Parable of the Old Man and the Young, written in July 1918.

Tom, this is a very interesting quotation, both for its anticipation of Owen (a connection I have not seen made before) and for demonstrating how Brooke very quickly came to understand the reality of 20th century warfare, and to lose whatever illusions he may have had - though, as I wanted to show in what I wrote, I think that his view of the war was far more ambivalent - right from the start - than most people assume. Many thanks, Adrian

Fascinating piece, Adrian. So much here that I didn't know. It makes me reconsider Brooke's patriotic sense of Englishness, expressed famously in "The Soldier", in the context of his European attachments. And I love the idea of responding to the German invasion of France by helping with the French harvest, an idea that anticipates VSO and the Peace Corps, perhaps.

About Me

I live in Gloucestershire. Before retiring, I was Director of Public and Professional Programmes at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. I'm President of the English Association and series editor of Cambridge Contexts in Literature. My recent publications include 'World and Time: Teaching Literature in Context' (C.U.P. 2009) and 'Extramural: Literature and Lifelong Learning’ published by Lutterworth Press in March 2012.
I’m a trustee of the Kempe Trust, and write a Kempe blog about my research into the stained glass of Charles Eamer Kempe and his Studio: http://thekempetrust.co.uk
For (a lot) more about me, go to my website:
www.adrianbarlow.co.uk